From our Old Bike Archives – Issue 83 – first published in 2019.
Interview: Paul McCann • Photos: Clarry Rial, Maurice Austin, Corner archives, Keith Ward, Rod Tingate, Bob Toombs.
It may be 60 years since Alec Corner left his native London, but the cockney accent remains – it could be ‘Arfur Daley talking. And while he had never raced a motorcycle before migrating to Melbourne in 1959, he became Australia’s most successful sidecar racer in a very short space of time, thanks to a chance meeting with veteran racer Frank Sinclair.
Alec was born in North Kensington, London, in 1932, and upon leaving school was apprenticed as a carpenter. Alec’s memory is still sharp and he recalls those austere days. “I did two years in the army after I finished my apprenticeship and I had my 21st birthday while I was in the army. When my wife and I got married in 1955 we applied for a house and were told we had ten years to wait for a house. We were living and sleeping in one room, and every time I saw my grandmother she said ‘get out of England, it’s finished.’ What upset her was that her three sisters all went to Canada after the war and she stayed, so she was always regretting not going. She lived in London all through the war as I did.”
And so in 1959 the Corners boarded a ship at Tilbury and sailed for Australia, taking with them Alec’s Vincent Rapide. Therein lies a story that typifies Alec’s cheeky nature. “I bought a solo Vincent from Conway Motors. I ended up losing my license, three years for speeding – the copper was upset because he couldn’t catch me. So I bought a Panther sidecar and borrowed a licence from one of the kids in the street who had muscular dystrophy and he didn’t ride very much. So he lent me his licence so if I got pulled up I had something to show. I sold the outfit for £140 and that was the only money we had to come out to Australia with. In the meantime I had the Vincent down in the basement and I had sprayed the engine and forks gunmetal grey, and tidied the whole bike up. Being a carpenter I built a crate and they sent a truck down to pick up our stuff when we emigrated. It cost me 30 quid to bring the bike out. I sold that bike to (Holden dealer and racing driver) Reg Hunt for $900 in the ‘seventies and it’s in America now.”
The Corners found lodgings at a hostel adjacent to Fishermans Bend, the former car and aircraft manufacturing centre that now has the West Gate Bridge above it. The site had first been used for motor racing in 1948 (see Tracks in Time, OBA 11) and a combined car and motorcycle race meeting in 1959 attracted Alec’s attention. “I went there and I photographed Frank Sinclair’s Vincent outfit and the Cooper Irving that Lex Davidson was driving and I ended up driving them both later in life so that was a coincidence.” Once they left the hostel, the Corners found digs above a shop in South Melbourne for a short time, then in a one-room flat behind a garage in Port Melbourne, where Alec also began to work. With a pregnant wife, Alec moved again to a ‘sleep out’, little more than a garden shed, where his twin daughters Sharon and Cherie were born. In 1961 Alec rode his Vincent to Ballarat to watch the races at Victoria Park, and again spotted Frank Sinclair’s outfit. “When I saw Frank racing at Ballarat I looked at the front forks and they were crooked, about 5 degrees off square, so I offered to fix them. By then we were in a commission house in Glenroy, and as soon as we had the house I organised to put up a double garage, and that’s where I fixed the bike. So we took it down to Phillip Island to try it out and Frank did a couple of laps with Roger Quick who was his regular passenger, then he asked me if I wanted to have a ride with Roger.” It was only a single slow lap, but it was the catalyst in what would be a ten-year association with Sinclair that netted some big wins.
“We spent a year getting used to the bike at Fishermans Bend, which was no longer used for motorcycle racing but you could still use the air strips. In the meantime I had built up a replica of a Grey Flash 500 Vincent that I was going to race. My first race meeting was at Calder in January 1963, the Harley Club Championships. We were B Grade sidecar and we won that and got third in A Grade. I also rode the Grey Flash and got third in the handicap at the same meeting. Then I had to decide whether I was going to continue solo riding or just concentrate on sidecars. Frank was paying all the bills, so I decide on the sidecar because technically the outfit was mine and Frank just supplied the money. The last time Frank rode the outfit was at Phillip Island after I’d repaired it because he had had enough by then and he thoroughly enjoyed carting us around for the prestige and the money, such as it was. We had Phil Irving who was a mate of Frank’s, and Clarrie Rial who was a photographer who supplied all the pictures. Gary Stevens was racing at the same time on a Vincent, and he told me a few years ago that what used to piss them off was they would be working on their bike in the pits trying to get ready for a race, and I’d be sitting in the car reading a book, our bike was always ready to go. I had an Austin 16 with leather upholstery and we would quite often tow the outfit to the races with it and I’d just rest up in it while the other outfit riders were all boozing up, I was never into any that. We just kept to ourselves, went out and done the job and went home. I don’t mind a port and lemonade in the summer but otherwise I’m not interested in that.”
Taking control
The new pilot for the Sinclair Vincent (with Ian McDonald now in the sidecar) went to Tasmania in March 1963 for two meetings, the first being the big fast Longford road circuit. They were well in the lead when the magneto failed on the final lap but the following weekend they won at the new Symmons Plains circuit, setting a lap record. But they really hit the headlines when the team journeyed to Bathurst for the Easter races in 1963. “The outfit that I was riding was a different one to the one I had photographed at Fishermans Bend in 1959. Frank had bought this one from a bloke who was using it for sprints and he’d machined the flywheels off to make them lighter, so Phil Irving had put metal plates on the flywheels to bring them back to balance. On the first run down Conrod Straight the crankpin broke, so I only had one lap of practice and the rest of the time I drove around the circuit in an Austin A40 to learn the circuit. We put the bike up on the trailer so we could work on it and I pulled the engine out. Then three of my mates, Graham Fredrickson, Joe Quinley and my passenger Ian McDonald – one of them had a 2.5 litre Riley –drove back to Melbourne and picked up a standard set of flywheels. Fortunately I had bought two (Vincent) bikes off a bloke who was preparing them for a land speed record, but it all folded and I bought the lot for 120 quid. There was a spare set of flywheels sitting in the shed, so they picked those up, turned around and drove the 500 miles straight back to Bathurst. While one drove the others slept in the car all the way. Vincents have rings shrunk into the crankcases where the main bearings went in, but because of the flywheels flapping about, this was a mess, so I peened all the aluminium around it to hold it in place. Fortunately it was good aluminium. When they turned up back from Melbourne I put the new flywheels in; they were only standard road flywheels and they only lasted the one race. I left all the valve timing in place, and it fired up all right but we only found out after the race it had two bent valves.” For the race, the rebuilt and untried Sinclair Vincent came to the line for the final event on the program and although Lindsay Urquhart briefly had his 500 Norton in front, Corner steamed away on the climb up the mountain and won easily.
Later in the year, the team came to Oran Park for the second meeting on the new track and won both starts. 1964 began with a win in the Victorian TT at Calder, followed soon after by a second win at Bathurst, with a new lap record. For the next three years, the Sinclair Vincent, with Corner at the helm and doing the tuning, was rarely beaten. They claimed the Bathurst Senior Sidecar win four years in a row – 1963 to 1966 – plus the Australian TT in 1964, 1965 and 1966, and major races in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. It seemed the winning streak would never end, but within the sidecar scene, things were changing. The traditional ‘sit up’ outfits were being surpassed by the new ‘kneeler’ a trend that Alec firmly opposed. “I hated kneelers, to me they were a stupid way to go. They had nothing to do with sidecars.” Frank Sinclair thought so too, and after Alec had won at Surfers Paradise in August 1966, put the outfit up for sale.
A fresh start
It wasn’t the end of racing, because Sinclair and Corner swapped three wheels for four. Frank first got hold of the highly successful Cooper Mk.IV which had been fitted with a supercharged Vincent Black Lightning engine, driven to two Australian hill climb championships by Lex Davison and maintained by Phil Irving. It was well now 16 years old and well past its prime, but Alec rebuilt the motor and raced the car over the next three years. It was later joined by the first car built by Jack Brabham and Ron Tauranac, the MRD, which had been brought back from England by Tasmanian Gavin Youl. “By now it was the ‘seventies,” says Alec, “and Frank suddenly woke up that we were going to get nowhere in car racing unless you could afford something really good, so then I pulled the Lightning engine out of the Cooper, and built another bike (sidecar) around it with all my parts, so technically it belonged to me, but he ended up selling that one as well.”
For Easter 1970, Alec was back on three wheels for Bathurst, with Gerry O’Brien in the chair. They were as quick as ever, but no match for Lindsay Urquhart’s brand new Honda 750-4 outfit, which ran away with the race while Alec finished second. The following year he was back, this time finishing third, but 1972 ended in disaster when the Vincent dropped a valve and destroyed the engine in practice. “I said to Frank I’d had enough, I had ten years. The main trouble was that all the sponsored racers were coming in. So I rebuilt that engine and Frank sold the outfit to Queensland. I could have bought that outfit for $2500, but at that time there was no Vintage racing or anything, so it was just a bike.”
Not surprisingly, Alec lists his favourite circuit as Bathurst, but also has fond memories of Longford – both tracks that required bravery as well as skill. Today Alec is a fit and alert 86 year old, and recently received Life membership to the Vincent Owners Club, presented to him by club president Trevor Evans. In his day, there was no one faster on three wheels in Australia, and his knowledge of Vincents is encyclopaedic.
Frank Sinclair: Rider, sponsor, philanthropist.
A butcher by trade, Frank Sinclair was a legend in Victorian motorcycling (as well as a dab hand at car rallying) and was a Life Member of the Harley Club of Victoria – a club he joined in 1930.
During the war he served with the Marine section of the RAAF in the South Pacific and was discharged as medically unfit for further war service and sent home in 1945. He managed to purchase two ex-army 1200cc Indians for £125 each, using one for delivery from his butcher shop in Windsor, Melbourne, and the other for pleasure riding. With help from his mate Clarry Rial, the second Indian was soon turned into a racer and used for scrambles and track events. Despite being huge and heavy, the Indian proved surprisingly useful and gave Frank a serious taste for racing. “The weight of this big monster was 928lbs (421kg) dry,” said Frank. “Clarry was soon to make this drab outfit into something worth looking at, straight through pipes, two Amal carbies, foot gear change and 356 lbs (161kg) weight off was enough to make this a worthwhile outfit to race in the late ‘forties.”
However after being soundly beaten at Ballarat by Frank Pratt on the first post-war Vincent to come to Australia, he decided he had to have one and put down a deposit of £25 with Disney Motors for a new Rapide. Frank recalled some years later, “When it arrived it was run in on the road by Clarry Rial and his business partner at Clarex Motors, Rex Tingate.” Over the next few years Frank raced the Vincent sidecar against many similar outfits ridden by the big names of the day – Lloyd Hirst, Keith Johnson, George Skinner and Les Warton – but was always down on speed until he met Phil Irving at a meeting at Ballarat Airstrip. Noting the performance deficit, Phil suggested Frank bring the Vincent to his home in Seaford “so he could have a gaze at it”. The result was a transformation and many successes followed at Darley, near Bacchus Marsh, Ballarat, Flinders Naval Base and Fishermans Bend. The last two circuits named, Frank actually had a major hand in gaining for the purpose of motorcycle racing. In both instances, he broke down bureaucratic resistance by pledging that all proceeds from the meetings would go to a deserving charity. “Not long after becoming president of the Harley Club, I realised that road race circuits were very scarce so I decided to try for “The Bend”. It took a while, but Frank’s persistence eventually won over and Melbourne had a circuit right smack in the middle of the city. In 1952 he ventured further afield and cracked the big one, the NSW TT at Bathurst, winning the Sidecar TT from Sandy McCrae’s Vincent and Bernie Mack’s Norton. He also won the Australian TT at Little River, Victoria in 1952 and a few months later took the 1953 TT at Longford, Tasmania. However Bathurst 1953 was a disaster, as Frank crashed his newly-built 750cc Vincent twin at the Cutting when the front girder forks collapsed, pitching him and passenger Alan Smith into the wall and leaving him with concussion. In 1957 he set a new Australian Speed record for sidecars at Baradine, NSW.
Gradually business commitments, including two butcher’s shops and running a Shell garage at Camberwell, took up more and more of Frank’s time and he began to allow others to race his outfits, the first being George Murphy, followed by Bob Mitchell and Noel Heggart. Later came the chance meeting with Alec Corner at Ballarat, and the string of successes that quickly followed. The Vincent was developed methodically to not only be fast and reliable, but handle well, as Frank described. “A lot of re-designing of the outfit went on with advice from Phil Irving and Lionel Ernshaw. As we wanted to keep it looking like a Vincent, we kept the front forks and the same basic frame which we lowered to one inch (ground) clearance on full bounce. The rear end was strengthened and a hole drilled up a bit in the front forks to take the wheel axle, all this to lower the works. The rear central spring and shockers were scrapped and two spring shocker units fitted, one to each side, to permit a lower seat. This also made necessary a four-inch longer wheel base, so longer engine mounts were made up and fitted, with a support bar each side and a plate across the engine side for strength. The head angle we also straightened up to give better steering, with spacers between the fork blades to enable a wider front tyre. Alec later used a full alloy disc plate clutch in place of the Lightning Ferodo and this worked very well. The last time Alec rode this bike for me was at Surfers Paradise in 1966, when Clive Smith, at that time president of the Harley Club, took Alec and his passenger all the way (from Melbourne) and paid their expenses. They won once more and it was a good win, the Australian Grand Prix, plus a record lap.”
As well as racing and running his businesses, Frank was president of the Harley Club for 16 years, and a tireless worker for charity. He was a Life Governor of the Royal Institute for the Blind, Life Governor of the Sutherland Homes for Children, and worked for 25 years as a volunteer at the Respirator Ward at Fairfield Hospital.
